Budapest and the Sheet Pan Dinner

Budapest is honestly, hands down, one of my most favourite places in the world. I don’t speak the language (though I’m trying to learn), yet I feel like I belong. I’m just so at ease there. The city is absolutely beautiful and so accessible by foot or public transportation with two sides of the river, Buda and Pest, that are diverse in personality and terrain. I often wonder what it would be like if I spent any length of time there. I’m hoping to find out soon.

I cooked a fair bit in my Airbnb while I was in Budapest. The markets are fun to seek out and they have a variety of in season produce to choose from; purchasing items via gestures, speaking broken languages, and showing amounts owed on handwritten scraps of paper. A quick wander to snap up what looks best creates the menu for the night, or days to come. That’s really how I love to cook. 1 – go to markets and see what is available. 2 – cook what looks good; make it work. I find if you have a preset menu in mind, often you are disappointed by the produce you find that’s needed to complete your preconceived menu. Learning to adapt to what’s available and what looks best has been the best thing for the quality of the meals I cook.

Living in Airbnbs does, however, pose a fun challenge in the kitchen. They aren’t always as equipped as you’d like them to be and more often than not, they have dull knives and cheap pans. No fear though, that is more than enough to be able to create the fantastic, balanced, delicious, and quick meal that I want to share with you today. Find any oven worthy vessel, something that will serve as a cutting board and a knife that will pass as a cutting device and you’re all set. Worse comes to worst, buy a cheapie cookie sheet and knife at the grocery store and it will serve you well. If you’re cooking at home, you likely have these few tools already even if you have the most basic kitchen.

So what am I cooking today? I’m cooking the sheet pan meal. Insanely easy, wildly customisable, and simply delicious. The methodology is always the same but the possibilities are endless. The key is to layer your flavours. Not everything can be dumped on the sheet pan and cooked all at once. You need to start with the longest cooking things first and then add more ingredients as time goes by. I’m sure I made this style of dinner more than once while I was in Budapest but I recall one night in particular when I wanted something delicious but had far better things to do than spend my time in the kitchen cooking. We all have nights like that right?! Let me tell you, I’m glad I opted for easy that night because it was a really good, chilled out night and it wouldn’t have been nearly as good if I had spent half the night stressing over some elaborate meal.

This is a call to all you people out there who are looking to impress a friend, a date, a spouse, an entire party but aren’t comfortable in the kitchen; this is the meal for you. Buy a good bottle of wine, do all the prep ahead of time and be a complete boss in the kitchen when your guest(s) arrives for dinner. I guarantee they will be impressed.

So how do we make this? It’s really a pretty easy; choose all your ingredients, choose the type of cuisine, chop all the ingredients up, preheat the oven, assign the cooking order, season the first layer and start cooking. Season each subsequent layer before tossing onto the baking pan. In an hour or less you have a complete, tasty meal, with only one pan to clean. Start by choosing a protein. Chicken works really well and is probably the most common protein that people choose. Choose a vegetable of substance; potato, sweet potato, butternut pumpkin. Choose two to three vegetables that are in season. Lastly, choose your cuisine. Simple methodology that gives you great results every single time.

Using the above rules here’s what today’s dish looks like…. Chicken, potatoes, onion, peppers/capsicum, and mushrooms. These are all basic ingredients that you can normally source year round. And well, because we’re talking about Budapest today, let’s keep it Hungarian inspired and use paprika. We’ll also add salt, pepper, a little garlic, and thyme. Assume about 10 minutes of prep time and an hour of baking time. Serve on it’s own for a well rounded meal or really class up the joint with a green salad, and warm bakery bread and butter. Oh and the wine, don’t forget the wine.

Drop a comment below and let me know if you like this style of cooking and if you’d like to see variations in the future. I happily entertain requests….